Woman's Naked Selfie is Reminder That 'Beauty Is About What You See'

One woman is taking to Instagram to question the very nature of beauty — and posted a cleverly captured naked selfie to prove her point.

“What the hell is beauty anyway?” Imogen, known as The_feeding_of_the_fox on Instagram, begins her post. She then questions why we as a society are so desperate to measure beauty, seeing as we can’t even define it.

“Because that lamp on your bedside, that you think is so beautiful, I think it’s ugly. And the color on my living room wall genuinely offends many of my friends, but I adore it,” she continued. “If I say something is beautiful, that makes it so. If I say my lumps and scars and folds are beautiful, that makes it so.”

Imogen ponders who would want to live in a world where we limit what beauty is.

“Where we try and contain beauty in tiny little boxes? Where beauty is the same thing over and over?” she asks. “The Beauty is undefinable and uncontrollable, it is an experience, not a thing,” she concludes. “Make your own rules, define your own beauty, dismantle the boxes, break out of the mound and start to realize that beauty is about what you see and no one else.”

Imogen spent years battling with her body image — either eating mindlessly or, she explains, desperately trying to lose weight. It was only after losing more than 100 pounds that she realized she had an eating disorder. Her blog and Instagram accounts now document her journey away from the diet culture and into the world of body positivity and intuitive eating.

Her posts are generally well-received, but her recent post questioning the idea of beauty hit home with her 11,000-plus followers, generating thousands of likes and hundreds of comments in a few days. Bloggers praised Imogen for being everything from “confident and beautiful” to “unbelievably strong.”

“That age old ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ but it’s bloody true. If it’s beautiful to you then yes it’s beautiful! We are so much more than the sum of our parts, our beauty comes from the package not the pieces,” one person wrote.

Noted another fan, “Perfect ! to see natural beauty. Great change from all these overly made up young ladies with 13″ of slop plastered all over.”

For anyone who hurls insults at the blogger, she’s quick with witty responses: “Babe, this makes no sense. Can we think of better insults please… this is just confusing. Do better next time,” she responded to one critic. To another, she lobbed, “Seriously, is that it?? My wife comes up with better insults than that. Go away and work on something actually funny. I give this an E. MUST TRY HARDER!!”